By the passage of time
Surely humanity is in grave loss
Except those who have faith, do good, urge each other to the truth (bi’l haq), and urge each other to perseverance (b’sabr).
–“Al Asr,” Qur’an 103:1-3
After some thought, I’ve decided to keep the implicit resolution I made in this post awhile back, and take a break from public commentary on Israel and Palestine, and for the most part from blogging and social media altogether. Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next full year, from now until the beginning of November 2024.
My position remains what it has been: all things considered, both the 10/7 Hamas attacks and the Israeli response to them were unjust; the immediate conflict should be resolved by a cease-fire (in both the West Bank and Gaza) and a hostage exchange, with non-combatant hostages held by Hamas exchanged for the cease-fire itself, and combatants held by Hamas exchanged for Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons, giving priority to children and/or adults held without trial. The preceding is not intended to endorse the legitimacy of the Israeli judicial or correctional system; it’s simply intended to assert an order of moral priority.
That’s all I intend to say for the next year. The blog, of course, will continue, and I’ll continue to administer it.
Policy of Truth 
this is a question related to war more broadly
are terms like genocide and terrorism overused terms when we’re discussing war? e.g. What is the % of casualties – or outright figure – that takes a series of killings in war from ‘non-genocide’ to ‘genocide or from non-terrorism to terrorism.
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I would say that the answer to your question (or both of them) is “yes.” More so than being “overused,” both terms are used without clear definitions, with no real attempt to deal with the complexities that would be implicit in any defensible definition.
I’ve discussed the definition of “terrorism” here:
Vicente Medina’s view of terrorism is the mainstream one. He defines terrorism as:”the use of political violence by individuals or groups who, with the aim of influencing a domestic or an international audience, deliberately or recklessly inflict substantive undeserved harm or threaten do so on those who can beyond reasonable doubt be conceived as innocent noncombatants.”
Defined that way, he regards terrorism as never justified. For the reasons I give in the essay I’ve linked, I wouldn’t define it that way. But if you insist on defining it his way, I would either say that the definition is too vague to yield determinate results in actual cases, or (depending on how the contested terms are cashed out) would regard “terrorism” as justified in the case I describe. (I wouldn’t call it “terrorism,” but I realize that others might.)
If violence is used to retaliate against systematic initiatory violence, and the victims have no other recourse, I regard it as justified deliberately to inflict harm on those who play a causal role in promoting that violence, and foreseeably to do so on those who don’t.
I don’t think that 10/7 really satisfies the preceding condition, but you’ll notice that I’ve said that 10/7 is not “all things considered” justified. That phrase is a placeholder for enormous complexities that no one seems to want to discuss.
Like most discussions of terrorism, Medina’s does not address the circumstance I describe in the paper. So though it packs a lot of normative terms into the definition (“substantive harm,” “deserved,” etc.), it doesn’t actually address the question of whether the violence I describe in my paper is justified or not. The relevant case looks as though it’s covered by the definition, but not clearly so, and no part of the substantive discussion ever directly addresses whether it is.
What we end up with is an account of “terrorism” that seems to cover the relevant ground without actually doing so, and seems to condemn anti-imperialist resistance to settler colonialism without in fact dealing with it. That dialectical situation describes the entire “Western” approach to terrorism. It’s as though someone were to ask: abstracting from all the wrongs of imperialism, abstracting from all of the strategems imperialists use to evade moral scrutiny, abstracting from the harms visited on its victims, and abstracting from any feasible course of action those victims might ever adopt, how can we devise a theory that condemns whatever violence they may use in resistance, insofar as it adversely affects people whose concerns are important enough to us to integrate into our theory? That question becomes the starting point and motivation of the whole theory.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the erotetics of ethical questions, on the presuppositions that are built into the questions that structure an inquiry. For now, suffice it to say that that’s just the wrong question. It abstracts from exactly what needs direct scrutiny. It seems to be impossible for Western theorists simultaneously to master the facts of a conflict as complicated as the Arab-Israel one, and to see it from the victims’ perspective. As long as that’s the case, definitions of “terrorism” and theories about it will start and end with false presuppositions. This is why the whole of our discourse is fixated on whether a given person “unequivocally” condemns Hamas or its attack. That one starting point must be accepted a priori. Everything else is contestable or deniable.
If I played games of that sort–starting with loaded questions as the condition for having a conversation–I would demand that everyone start a conversation with me by admitting that Israel has, since its founding, been a terrorist state by my definition. It was founded in terrorism, sustained by terrorism, and currently exists through terrorism. But a view like this has more chance of getting me fired or arrested than of being heard, regardless of its merits. And in any case, starting a conversation with loaded questions is the wrong way of starting one.
On genocide, I had actually written a draft of a blog post on this, but decided against posting it. The standard definition of “genocide” is given here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
One obvious problem here is what counts as a relevant “group.” But setting that aside, the most problematic clause is (c):
The “in part” clause has the absurd implication that actions taken against a tiny fraction of some arbitrarily-defined group can count as “genocide.” I understand that international lawyers have developed all kinds of clever hedges against this reductio, but that’s what they all are: clever hedges. They don’t address the fundamental question: when does a “part” become relevant? For instance, at what proportion of the total?
People have very loosely asserted that the Russian attack on Ukraine is a “genocide,” that Hamas’s attack on Israel was a “genocide,” and that Israel’s attack on Gaza is a “genocide.” In no case do the deaths in these examples (yet) rise to even a fraction of 1% of the total population. I regard such talk as both sad and absurd. Absurd because the language of “genocide” is now routinely used for cases that are not by any plausible account genocides. Sad because people seem to feel that unless we describe them that way, we lack the terminology to give them the moral salience they deserve. The lesson would seem to be that moral discourse requires a systematic commitment to semantic obfuscation.
I’ll leave you with this last thought. I think Jonathan Cook’s hypothesis about what Israel is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) is the best I have seen.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-27/israel-plan-gaza-sinai/
Though I agree with his overall point, I disagree with his use of “genocide.” What he’s describing is not (up to this point) genocide but ethnic cleansing.
Ilan Pappe has a good discussion of ethnic cleansing in chapter 1 of his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (which could have been subtitled, “Plus Ca Change, Plus C’est La Meme Chose“). The simplest of the many correct definitions he offers is: “expulsion by force in order to homogenise the ethnically mixed population of a particular region or territory” (p. 2). “By force” includes massacre. In the case of Gaza, it’s plausible to see Israel as engaging in ethnic cleansing by creating a humanitarian crisis that requires the evacuation of the population of north Gaza to the south, and when that becomes unbearable, from the south into Sinai. The “region” at issue is Greater Israel (Eretz Israel) as described in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, a region that corresponds vaguely to Biblical Israel, but lacks defined borders.
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/general/declaration-of-establishment-state-of-israel
To this day, no one knows what the boundaries of the “whole of Eretz Israel” are.
Israel is quietly beginning this same process in the West Bank. Much of the West Bank is now a no-go zone for the Arab population of Areas B and C. If you step outside of the immediate vicinity of your home, you stand to be shot on sight by settlers, soldiers, or paramilitary units.
This is just a re-play of Israel’s founding. We’re now at Act 2 or 3 of the Zionist drama–the place where Leon Uris’s Exodus meets Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. At this point, no one can keep track of the acts, the corpses, or the lies involved in this drama. Everything is to take place under cover of darkness while invoking Enlightenment, a pious veil of ignorance that conceals epic brutality. We’re just obliged to genuflect before the Zionist idol, as Abrahamic monotheists do before the psychopath they call “God.” When you see how much ink has been spilled in extenuation of the conquest of Canaan or the sacrifice of Abraham’s son, it only seems natural that the same should have to be done for God’s Chosen Nation today. But that, alas, is where I bow out.
You’ve asked some great questions, all of which bear discussion. But that’s going to be my last response.
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I wanted to add one quick postscript to my last comment. I saw this piece by Omer Bartov in The New York Times on “genocide” that I basically agree with, or alternatively, that basically agrees with my last comment.
I agree with Bartov’s distinction between “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide,” and agree that the first applies to the present Israeli case, not the second. I belabor this (and break my “silence resolution”) because a few weeks ago, I signed a much-contested letter, “Philosophers for Palestine,” that (in my view wrongly) claims that a “genocide” is taking place in Gaza. I disagreed with that particular statement, but agreed with the crux of the rest of the letter, so I signed it without regrets.
My one objection to Bartov is his claim that the 10,500 Palestinians killed by Israel are “well over five times as many as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas.”
First of all, 10,500/1,400= 7.5, i.e., well over seven times as many, not “well over five times as many.” So let’s get the math straight.
Second, 1,200 Israelis died, not >1,400. So the actual figure is 8.75 times as many.
Third, I don’t regard the Israeli combatants killed as having been “murdered.” The ones doing occupation duty were legitimate targets of war. Bartov makes no effort to distinguish combatants from non-combatants killed on the Israeli side. But the distinction exists, and has obvious application here. A historian-expert should know that. Another reminder that there’s no substitute for cognitive independence.
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very interesting.
I think this distinction is key but every pro-Palestinian side is repeating genocide instead.
and we now know that the IDF’s incompetence and unpreparedness were partially responsible for the death of many innocent civilians on 10/7 because of their inability to secure their boundaries and as you stated the number has been downgraded to 1200 and a third of those are soldiers
I must say their propaganda is pretty poor. From one fanciful tale to another
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The pro-Palestinian side is repeating “genocide,” true. I think it’s incorrect, but it also seems excusable. The distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide is hard to keep in mind when the stakes are as high as they are. The pro-Palestinian side also feels the need for a verbal counterweight to the monomaniacal fixation on 10/7, and sadly, only “genocide” seems to work that magic. Besides all of that, here is a compilation of Israeli statements of intention about Gaza. Whether or not the IDF has lived up to this bloodcurdling litany, it certainly sounds like the language of genocide.
https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/fighting-amalek-in-gaza-what-israelis-say-and-western-media-ignore/
If you go on TikTok, by the way, go to the account of Shaun King or BlackVancouver, and you’ll find unapologetic Israeli displays of schadenfreude over Palestinian suffering, down to Israelis dancing to newly-composed songs about how the Palestinians of Gaza have been turned into “kebabs.” I don’t mean one or two videos. I mean dozens upon dozens–several a day, for the last month or so. Even TikTok can’t keep up with Israelis’ unhinged outpourings of nihilism and hate. This is the nation that’s been held up to us as the acme of Western civilization, on whose behalf we ourselves must be dragged into war, lest “civilization” fall to “barbarism.” Hard to believe any of that, unless you’re a Euro-American intellectual or war planner.
Incidentally, contrary to the headline of the preceding piece, I don’t think the “Western media” has ignored the genocidal character of Israeli discourse. It’s all been faithfully reported. It would be more accurate to say that the Western public has read the reports but found them impossible to digest or comprehend. It’s too difficult for the average member of the “Western world” to grasp that the erstwhile victims of the Holocaust can, without much effort, sound a lot like Nazis when they want to.
Same thing happened with Westerners’ inability to process the Nazi character of the Azov Brigade in Ukraine, by the way.
https://forward.com/news/555676/azov-brigade-ukraine-nazi-extremism-jewish-criticism/
It didn’t take the average middle class American long to go from “Never Again!” to “Maybe Just This Once.” It just goes to show that they’re less averse to fascism than they think they are.
I’ve always enjoyed the superiority complex Israelis like to display about their stoic capacity for endurance in the face of “terrorism,” and the “rough neighborhood” they live in. No sense of self-awareness that anyone but Israelis might know anything about terrorism, or have experienced it. Along comes 10/7, and their reaction to it is more psychopathic and unhinged than anything the Americans did after 9/11, or anything the people of Spain or Britain did after they were attacked. What does it look like? Well, it kind of looks like the Hamas reaction to Israel’s depredations against Gaza for the last sixteen years. The same psychopathic death worship, just in Hebrew, and with less excuse than people who’ve been living under blockade and aerial bombardment for the last sixteen years.
There’s no artifact less forgiving than a mirror. Too bad that neither the Israelis nor the Americans can bear to take a look.
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Really sad to see you stop blogging temporarily, especially during these times. I’ve followed your writings for so long and especially on the Palestinian issue, you have always offered fantastic insights. I hope selfishly that we see you write sooner than your projected date, but if not, I wish you the absolute best.
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I am signature 862.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RgFFWe0mbHxQCEBQ7J9F9MF5U13kGZtr3HrIOr3yBV4/edit
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Joshua Katz’s “response” to the preceding.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/double-standards-at-princeton
No comment for now. Enjoy the silence, as Depeche Mode once said.
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Time to make a forced population transfer of Arabs living in E. Jerusalem and Samaria to Gaza. Like the post War Allies removed 14 million Germans from the Czech Republic and Poland after Hitler denounced the “stolen occupied territories”. Time to permanently end the lie: “From the River to the Sea Palestine must be Free” lie.
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I belatedly saw this comment and approved it. In general, I don’t approve your comments, because I feel no obligation to permit you to colonize my blog with your off-topic ravings. But when your propaganda is on topic, there is a point in posting it. I’m all in favor of people’s seeing Zionism for the ethnic cleansing operation it is, and also in favor of having Zionists explicitly come out against freedom in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It surely is a lie to say that equal freedom is any part of the Zionist program for Eretz Israel. So your candor is greatly appreciated.
With a little more candor, you might have added that as far as Israel is concerned, ethnic supremacy, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are to take freedom’s place. No worries: I’ll add it. What are friends for?
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Zionism = Israeli nationalism. Just that simple.
The post war peace imposed upon both Germany and Japan involved a forced population transfer of 14 million Germans from Czech and Polish lands. But you biased ignorant Goyim today do not refer to this policy which ended 2 German started World Wars as “ethnic cleansing”. The problem with ignorant Goyim who don’t know the history of their own countries, they ass-u-me that Israelis do not consider post WWII peace as a viable model to impose upon Palestinians who made a Pearl Harbar like attack on Israel on Oct 7th!
But there’s simply no cure for Goyim stupidity.
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The biased ignorant goyim administrator of the blog has approved your comment, and thanks you for your pro bono efforts at educating his people.
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